I spent most of last Monday digging
up an old, leaky irrigation system in the front yard, and I brought a portable
radio outside with me, to listen to while I worked. After a couple of hours of informative
programming on a listener-sponsored community station, I decided I’d had enough
of that for the day and turned to one of my guilty pleasures—sports talk
radio. And in that world the news was
all about a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers named Colin Kaepernick, who
has been remaining seated during the national anthem before the team’s
pre-season football games. The first time
he did it, no one noticed, but at last Sunday’s game in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a
reporter saw him, and asked him about it in a locker-room interview after the
game, at which point Kaepernick declared that he was sitting in protest of the
oppression of African-Americans and other people of color in the United
States.
The hosts of my radio talk show felt
compelled to weigh in with their opinions about what Kaepernick had done, and
then they opened the phone lines and took calls from listeners who expressed
their wide-ranging and contradictory views.
As the week went on, this controversy spread across the media landscape,
with everyone from Kaepernick’s former coach, Jim Harbaugh, and 49ers legend
Jerry Rice, to the Republican Party’s nominee for President publicly expressing
their disapproval. Meanwhile, some
current and former members of the armed services, not wanting to let others took
offense on their behalf, “tweeted” messages of support at #VeteransForKaepernick. At the 49ers final exhibition game on
Thursday, at “Salute to the Military Night” in San Diego, Kaepernick and
teammate Eric Reid knelt on one knee during the anthem, in what they intended
as a gesture of mingled defiance and respect, and tens of thousands of fans in
the stadium got to contribute their voices to the conversation by booing
Kaepernick lustily every time he was on the field.
Clearly, Colin Kaepernick has
touched a nerve by taking this stand, or rather, this seat or this knee. He has aroused countless people to want to have
their views be heard on what they think of his actions, and whether his taking
them is justified, whether he is personally qualified to be making this
protest, and whether the way he has gone about it is appropriate or offensive. And I personally am not immune to this
reaction. But I’m going to spare you my
opinions, because I think today’s scripture readings point us in a different
direction. They are asking us to think,
not about what Colin Kaepernick’s protest means to us or to others, but about what
it is actually like for Colin Kaepernick.
When all his teammates and coaches, and the owner of the team, and every
one of the fifty-thousand other people in the stadium who were physically able
to do so rise to their feet in a ritual of unity and love for our country, a
ritual you yourself have proudly participated in hundreds of times before in
your high school, college, and professional careers, what is it like to sit,
alone, on the bench?
Jesus says that this kind of loneliness,
this alienation from other people, is what we can expect when we join his
movement. We can expect to have moments
when we are estranged from the groups we thought we wanted to belong to, and
even from the person we thought we would be to be loved and accepted by them. It is an estrangement that can turn us into
enemies in the eyes of our nation, our church, even our family: "Whoever
comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers
and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” This is a hard
saying, and it’s natural to think, “Jesus can’t really mean that—he must be overstating
the case.” And in a sense he is, but the purpose of the exaggeration is to
underscore his essential point: that following him means sharing his commitment
to doing the will of God whatever the cost.
We have to be ready for those moments when we know what we must do to be
faithful to the truth of our lives, when even though it is certain we will be
misunderstood and hurt people we care about, and in those moments we have to be
willing to act.
If we’re lucky we are never called
to do this at the cost of our health, our freedom, or our lives. But the point is that we are never truly free
unless we give God the freedom to tell us what to do and how far to go. We are never fully alive if we are not
willing to lay our lives on the line in response to the Spirit’s stirring of our
conscience. And if we are fortunate
enough to live in a society where Christians are the majority, where social
deviance and political dissent are widely tolerated, it shouldn’t serve as an
excuse to take fewer risks with our freedom, or stands on our conscience, but
as a license to take more. This doesn’t
necessarily mean that we have to go out looking for courageous stands to take; the
naturally-unfolding circumstances of our lives give us ample opportunities to take
difficult and unpopular actions. Even
those actions we recognize as especially heroic often turn on a fairly straightforward
personal choice. Rosa Parks had no idea,
when she refused to give up her seat in 1955, that she would catalyze the
Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights movement. She was simply, she would later say, “tired
of giving in.” Yet as this example shows
us, it is actions, even modest personal ones, that really count. They have far-reaching effects that words do
not.
Actions create stories, and symbols,
with the power to move other people. In
July LeBron James and three other professional basketball superstars stood
together and made speeches, at a nationally-televised awards ceremony, about racial
division, systemic failure, and violence both by and against the police. It received a polite murmur in response, whose
tone was generally appreciative. But those
speeches were a blip on the meter compared to the volume and intensity of the
reaction that Colin Kaepernick got, by sitting alone, saying nothing. His action transformed an obligatory ritual that
rarely gets a second thought, into a highly charged symbol of our country’s
congenital wound of racist oppression and violence, a wound that has never
healed, and continues to tear us apart.
And in the days since, as people have passionately argued with each
other about their interpretations of what he did, that disunity has been
visible for everyone to see. Whatever
you make of Kaepernick’s action, it is hard to dispute its effectiveness.
Of course, there is no greater
example of the power of an act to transform a symbol than the one given us in
the gospel. Jesus’ teachings about the
forgiveness of sins and the blessedness of the poor, about loving one’s
enemies, and the subversive, hidden nearness of the Kingdom of God, would surely
have been forgotten centuries ago if he had not been willing to die on a
cross. In doing so, Jesus changed that cross from a
sign of terror and despair at the ruthless power of the Roman state, into a
symbol of unconquerable freedom of conscience, and faithfulness to the will of
God. And God’s act of raising Christ
from the dead completed the transformation, so that now the cross is a symbol
of the truth of all that Jesus taught, of justice, forgiveness and
reconciliation, of abundant life’s victory over death, a sign of promise even
to those without a hope in the world, that their suffering itself is eloquent,
and God is listening.
And for those of us who have
something left to give the world, and come to Jesus to take up his cross, it is
the sign of our freedom and our mandate, in gestures of protest and works of
mercy, to act like him. The importance
of these actions is not measured in how much they shift the balance of political
power, or even lessen the suffering in the world. In those respects, they often seem to be so
much spitting in the wind. But they are also
important as signs of resistance and hope.
They create symbols and stories that inspire and provoke, encourage and
infuriate, chasten and embolden, others to act.
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